Modernism’s Theopolitical Imaginary, or, Spiritual Charisma in a Contested Field

Charles Andrews’s rich study of modernism’s theopolitical imaginary gives us, among many other directions for investigation, a way to explore several ironies in deeply aesthetic modes of resistance to civil religion, itself a complex aesthetic project. The fragile cultural space that Andrews reveals, in literature, for critique and agency in the face of religiously-inflected statist violence matters because it may animate creative social action and offer political hope. But because, as Andrews often reminds us, compelling literature is rarely prescriptive or programmatic, and is effective rather for its ability to register still-emerging potentialities, we are left with a few complicated questions about the ambiguous role of art and literature in desacralizing the nation-state.

In these brief comments, I frame these complications in some sociological terms that approach what is so tricky about this situation of literature, religion, and critique of nationalist violence. Following Andrews, I want to better understand the modern institutional distribution of (to put it awkwardly) spiritual charisma, auratic force, or transcendent meaning, as a mode of symbolic or cultural capital. And I want to insert literature itself into this social distribution, by which the state gathers so much religious meaning and the secular arts are left in uncertain arrangements elsewhere.

The sacralization of the nation-state in a context of social differentiation is genuinely remarkable, and Andrews opens questions about modernist responses to this phenomenon that others will also be able to pursue. As a modern process, secularization is generally characterized by some process of differentiation, in which significant life practices are arranged as relatively autonomous spheres with distinct institutions and rules—government, medicine, commerce, religion, education, art, and so on. Each sector negotiates for its space and identity in dynamic tensions with others and demarcates public and private spheres in different ways. Andrews’s study is an excellent occasion to reflect on a sub-plot within this large and complex story, what we might call the exchange of numinous aura among social sectors.

My speculation is that, faced with a diminished sphere—through privatization—in modern regimes, religious institutions have exchanged their potent auratic and ritualistic force, gathered over so many generations, with the state for access and standing. At the same time, literature and the arts have offered their far more precarious and informal prestige, even if gathered over the same long and vital history, to the educational sector and its very different institutions. While there are many other factors and spheres at play, my opening picture is this division or even rivalry: the state’s assimilation of religious affect and meaning, the university’s assimilation of the most prestigious expressions of the secular imagination and aesthetics. In other, counter-factual worlds, we could imagine these terms reversed (so that, say, the position of poet laureate gave one significant political power, and spiritual authority led to tenure); but this is not the case. In the actual history that Andrews engages, while both stories of institutional assimilation involve a disciplining of unruly energies and taming of charisma, the nation-state’s sacralization is a uniquely potent phenomenon in secularizing cultures.

How does modernist literature attune us to this social economy, the (re-)distribution of the sacred? And—following Andrews’s approach to literature as a consequential theopolitical discourse—how might we insert literature itself into our analysis of this economy? While Andrews shows in detail how these authors critique civil religion, I’m also interested in how these authors participate in a rival symbolic economy.

In regard to the first question, about literary representations of social distribution of the sacred, I think of Virginia Woolf’s unenviable Miss Kilman in Mrs. Dalloway. Why does Woolf represent this devout, earnest, principled pacifist in such unappealing terms? The narrator focalizes Clarissa Dalloway, who offers these ungenerous thoughts:

for Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired; she was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever in it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it, her dismissal from school during the War—poor embittered unfortunate creature! (12)

My suggestion is that we read this, not as a caricature of a particular personality, but as Woolf’s allegory for what is left after the expropriation of religious charisma and grace by the governmental sphere. Miss Kilman’s faith and ethical faculties have not been depleted, but their aesthetic force or transcendent aura has been siphoned off. A few pages later, Woolf offers an indication of this redistribution, the gathering of sacred affect around new sites:

Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing—poor women waiting to see the Queen go past—poor women, tut-tut—actually had tears in his eyes. A breeze flaunting ever so warmly down the Mall through the thin trees, past the bronze heroes, lifted some flag flying in the British breast of the Mall and held it high as the car approached… (19-20)

While more scholars are now including religion in Woolf’s social mapping of affect (see, for example, the forthcoming The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Religion and Stephanie Paulsell’s 2019 Religion Around Virginia Woolf), Andrews offers bracing terms for analyzing Woolf’s and other’s critique of aestheticized state violence. Modernism’s frequent ambivalence toward religious traditions is in part a reaction against such an affective appropriation by the state, particularly in the service of war.

The mass of English war writing of the 1920s—primarily novels, memoirs, and poetry—expressed a wide range of attitudes toward the war and nationalism. Unsurprisingly, much that was circulated with enthusiasm was patriotic and largely uncritical toward state-sponsored violence, even in its religious inflections. Yet the literature of this period that has been assimilated by powerful educational institutions, in curricula and scholarship, has for the most part been the fraction of that writing that stood against the sacralization of war and the state. Woolf is exemplary in this regard, in fiction; in English poetry, Wilfred Owen’s canonization as the quintessential (anti-)war poet follows a similar trajectory, or institutional sorting. While I’m personally grateful for the supportive institutional history around these authors, and would have difficulty teaching anything interesting about writers who fully endorsed civil religion in the context of war, I’m nevertheless curious about the sociology-of-literature question I’ve been exploring, that is, questions about how symbolic and cultural capital are distributed. If the nation-state has frequently succeeded in assimilating religious affect as an alibi for its violence, we might think of the university’s assimilation of powerful anti-war, anti-state writing as a strategy for gathering stature within a contested institutional field. As the Second World War threatened, Woolf herself reflected on the vulnerable but potentially resistant role of the university in Three Guineas, in eloquent meditations on educational autonomy from political instrumentalization as an aspect of war resistance. Literature is an aspect of that institutional possibility.

Andrews’s careful readings of D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, as well as Woolf, enrich this possibility, as these writers are too often neglected by reading communities committed to histories of theopolitics. While I admit that I’ve finished reading this study thinking about how difficult it is to desacralize the nation-state without changing the material bases of its power, I’m also excited by Andrews’s readings. We see in this work how these novels may generate the ethical and political intuitions that matter for pursuing change.